Here's an interesting story about the Sacagewea coin, from fave blogger Mojo Mom. The story is about how the coin was to be retired, and Mojo Mom's kind of sad, because it's the only coin image we have in the US with a mom and her baby. I'm not sure I'd ever seen one of these coins. I fell in love with the sweetness of the picture, having a sling-bound young one around the house as I do...

Since I've been writing about dinner fatigue lately, and considering so many ways to do less domestic work, it's only fitting to say we had a very small Thanksgiving, and what a treat. We roasted our turkey, the rainy weather prohibiting our usual joy of tossing the bird on the BBQ. We cooked up some dishes, but purchased others ahead of time, and spent the morning oohing at the Thanksgiving Day parade, followed by Scrabble, reading (Zadie Smith's On Beauty was my vacation novel), baby-playing, and waiting for any sign of rain let up to send Samira out to run up and down the street on her Heelys.

I must say, it was delightful: five adults around the table, a baby who went quietly to bed in between dinner and dessert. Samira spent the post-dinner hours writing faux pen-pal letters in which she complained that her dad "was talking about work for, I'm estimating, an hour"(yes, we were talking about the perennial favorite topic, education, and alternately solving our society's educational problems, and announcing that such problems were intractable). Our dinner guest had arrived with an all-time excellent kid present: a stack of green computer paper from her office, and a bunch of colorful post-it pads. These were put to good use. Samira continued on to describe her imaginary friends, having been intrigued by the Foster's World of Imaginary Friends float we saw as we watched the Thanksgiving Day parade on TV.

It's predictable that we'll return to big Thanksgivings, lots of people, kids running around. Those too are fun, but try out the small table sometime, we did and had a wonderful time.

They used to call us soccer moms, which was fine with me, because hanging outdoors on gorgeous fall Saturdays and chatting with other parents and hearing the latest gossip while our kids run around is my idea of fun. However, for those moms who cringed at the title, never fear, we still apparently are a swing group that decides elections. We're back to being called our demographically descriptive name: married mothers with children. AKA soccer moms. AKA security moms. AKA anything they've tried to call us in the past. We've outsmarted them, it seems. There go the metaphors. Out the window.

Here's a report, pre-election, from Muckraking Mom, a blog with a tagline to love: Because Muck doesn't scare Moms.

Muckraking Mom's a relatively new blog, it looks like she launched this summer, so I'm welcoming her to our blogroll here at Everyday Mom.

I've recovered from the field trip, well, from the bus ride, which despite a well-behaved group of children, and a teacher who closely attends them, that bus was noisy. And bumpy, even though the driver stayed off our well-known, Belgian-bricked thoroughfare, it seems that every road between our little school, through North Philadelphia and into downtown is pothole laden. The baby fared well in the sling. If the kids weren't so darn funny--they really are a walking comedy troupe waiting to be discovered--the day would have been quite awful.

It wasn't the best of field trips. Things got off to a bad start when the tour guide, a handsome, late 20-something man who seemed also to be a curator and specialist, announced to the children, "I'll be your teacher today." One of the children, in all innocence, panicked, clearly, at the loss of their beloved Kia, but still thinking logically, responded in a plaintive voice, "But we already have a teacher." Ross covered quickly. "I mean, I'll be your teacher while you're here." But it was all over, almost, from that moment. I teach, and I know, you've really got to go dramatic when that's your start.

The kids were there to learn about William Penn, founder of our dear city, and Quaker leader. The problem was, they'd already learned about William Penn, and in a richer, more textured way.

Their teacher had figured out how to teach both about what Penn did that was good. They learned about his vision of religious freedom, which in a nutshell, meant that one had to be religious, but should be able to pick which congregation to worship with. It was radical for his time. Their teacher--their all-the-time teacher had also talked about the underside of the founding of the city, that this was Indian land, Lenape/Delaware land to be exact, and a certain shadiness marked the boundary making. Some would call it the colonists’ cleverness, others would call it cheating. In either case, adding in the story of the walking purchase adds to the story, and other local history sites the kids have visited were able to include this and other texture in the usual tale of colonial Philadelphia.

So when the children were asked what they knew about Penn, among their other offerings was the fact that there was some conflict to the story, and that even though Penn was a Quaker and they go to Quaker school, the Lenape matter too. They raised their hands, and one after another, mentioned the walking purchase story, said there was tension between Penn and the Lenape.

This didn't go over so well with Ross. He let the children speak, obviously frustrated when the third child raised the issue again. And he continually downplayed the story, which surprised me, since so many museums have changed their interpretations in recent years. It was odd to see this one maintain such an old-fashioned and exclusive stance.

Have you ever been in a class or lecture that starts coming apart at the seams, where audience and lecturer are at cross purposes, and no one can get the tracks to connect? Well that's this field trip. Teacher-for-an-hour Ross couldn't quite reach the kids, and the kids' curiosities were tangling up the official presentation. I won't even try to describe the reaction when the whole group trekked upstairs for a visit to a gallery and raised questions about why there was a traffic light inside the building, at the entrance to the exhibit. Sample questions: Why is that here? Don't they need it outside with the cars? Is it heavy? Why is it so low down? How many people does it take to carry a traffic light inside? to which Ross finally responded, first patiently, then tersely: it's here. I carried it up. Maybe someone helped. Let's move inside the gallery, look kids: here's the wampum that describes the pact between Penn and the Lenape....." (to which one of the children asked, "How do we know it's real?" which in my book makes her a junior historian if there ever was one.)

Samira declared it the worst field trip ever. Bet she was glad her mom was there. We all had a big headache, and grumbling tummies, by the time we piled off the school bus later that afternoon.

Post-election day, and this will be my memory forever:

Waking up, my husband, who's been up for an hour, tells me the Democrats have taken the House, and that two Senate races are still too close to call.

NPR is turned on.

My oldest daughter, Samira, ambles in, wearing her fuzzy purple PJ's, and heaves herself over me to cuddle from the other side of the bed. I tell her what's going on, and that our family is happy about the new political turn.

We start to talk about how Nancy Pelosi will become the Speaker of the House. I tell her what an important position this is. We've been talking over the past few days about Congress, the Senate, the House of Representatives, though it's still a bit abstract. I tell her that Nancy's from San Francisco, and that rings a bell of familiarity. I tell her how our country has never had a woman in such a singularly powerful position before, how we've never had a chamber of Congress run by a woman.

And I thought to myself: never by a woman who is also a mother, who is also a mother, yes, of five children. At 66--the age that many Americans dream of retiring by--Nancy Pelosi is at her peak and moving ahead. I and so many women I know who are in our middle years, who had careers that zoomed quickly and moved fast, and which we assumed would follow the usual path journeyed by men, by mythical men who keep moving ahead (as opposed to real life men, whose careers too, often falter in middle age), here's yet another example of a woman who had major caretaking responsibilities, and in a few months will be Speaker. This adds extra inspiration to me, and probably to others of us who wonder whether life's public options peter out after these middle, caretaking years, or whether second and third acts lay ahead for us all.

And then we roused ourselves from the comfy pile of pillows and blankets, pulled on some clothes, woke the baby (I'm here to report that miss 4 am can now be called SlumberBaby--she has slept through the night twice in a row...), and headed downstairs to make breakfast, pack the day, feed miss SlumberBaby, and in every sundry way, begin the new day.

We are definitely in major sleep deprivation mode at our house, that sweet little vixen otherwise known as our youngest daughter's been on 4 am wake up, still. In lieu of trusting me to provide witty and insightful commentary on life, I refer you to some of my favorite bloggers this morning. My major recent accomplishment, ongoing, is pilfering saved treasure foods from my upper closets and trying them out. Today: Tea from Betty's Tea Room in Harrogate, UK, a remnant of a trip to Yorkshire at a time when my university paid for my travel. Friday: a jar of Cranberry Jam/relish, which we tasted and rejected for its Grand Marnier heaviness. Some things are made for the top shelf, apparently.

Last week was a big conference in Toronto about motherhood, where the stage was shared by a bunch of academics, some authors, and bloggers. Reports are of dawn till midnight conversations, lots of inspiration, and lots of time without kids. I do understand the glee, but since I had been invited to give a keynote there, and couldn't attend because they didn't offer childcare, I had a slightly different take. Here's Mojo Mom on her experience, mixed with lots of other stuff, and Mother Shock where Andi has posted her talk about "The escalation of cool," basically her take on how the public and published face of motherhood has shifted in part, to prefer drugs-and-sex memoirs, and her comment that all this hot talk keeps at bay the real poignancies of motherhood is an absolute treasure. It's testament to how much our publishing venues prefer parent stories from those who were bad boys (and bad girls) and reformed, that she's posting it on her own blog. All the better for those of us who know her, I say. If you're reading this post and want to click and it's past the first week of November, here's the Mother Shock "Cool Essay" trackback.

For another take, check out the always smart, always fun Toronto Mama/MUBAR, a Canadian blogger who also attended the motherhood conference. Toronto Mama was surprised after to see the organizer criticize bloggers as hijacking the real issues of motherhood. Apparently, one of these issues is childcare. Apparently bloggers focus on everything else take the focus off political issues. Hmm. Ironic, yes, for a conference that didn't offer childcare, and also a but of a turf battle between academics and bloggers, one that isn't all that surprising, given how much blogging pushes the comfort zone of academics, and how much more attention it gets. I'm glad to hear the updates. Given my status as a trained academic who left fulltime academic work, and who never much liked academic conferences, I can't say I'm sorry to have missed it.

Back to the local, here are my pals from the kids' after school playground: ZMommy who apparently is also tossing out old food from her pantry--it's going around! and Imperfect Serenity who is writing about fear, and about our upcoming elections.

Earlier today I was leafing through the new Green Eggs and Ham Cookbook, which is awfully fun. I'll review it at at later date, but seeing the silly Dr. Seuss drawings and dilly-dallies made me glad I have a baby so I can mop up whatever Dr. Seuss I missed the first time around. And that reminded me of an e-mail that popped up early this week, from a group called Just One More Book. Just One More Book looks to be a 3-times-a-week podcast about kids books they love, new and old, and the website has both the podcast and a written review. I've enjoyed it, and want to pass it on to others looking around the world of children's books. They'll be on our side bar of links from now on.

This week's been a busy one here. We're still in the post-daylight-savings-time slump. Usually, my slump hits when I realize how early it gets dark. This year, "m too tired by 4 pm to even think about it, since the baby is waking at 4 am, shows no signs of abating, has been boycotting, alternately, her morning or afternoon nap. The baby's having a much rougher time adjusting, and let me tell you, she's bringing us all with her.

Four a.m. wakeups. Not good.

Here's my story for the week. I was quick-cleaning out a kitchen cabinet, you know, the spontaneous project that happens when you open a cabinet door, something tumbles out, and you realize (sleep-deprivation helps here) that life cannot go on unless you clean the mess right now, no mind that the eight year old is hungry and the baby's hungry, that cabinet must be cleaned. Well, as I sorted through cans and jars, triaging them into piles of toss, or return to clean cabinet, I realized something about myself.

Why is my cabinet filled with yummy things that are three years old?

That's right. Here's a jar of fig jam from the lovely cheese shop in Chestnut Hill. Here's a tin of interesting lamb rub, spices for meat, with a most excellent wrapper design on that tin, purchased several summers ago at the Fairway on Long Island, that now, unfortunately, is hard and packed together and probably not so good to use. Here's a fancy chocolate lollipop from our former next-door neighbor's Halloween party in 2004, that's three Halloweens back. Stuck among the mundanities of brown rice, and tuna fish, and chicken bouillon cubes are goodies that are now no good.

That's because they were deemed too special to use. Put away. Saved for a special day.

I know I'm not the only one to do this. I'm sure that we children who saved the red M & M's for last, carefully sorting out our colors into preferred order, and eating the less desired one first, all grow up to become adults who don't open the fig jam for three years. And yes, when I examined the top shelf of another cabinet (this, after getting some dinner to the children, and then, the children to bed, my obsessions run only so deep before responsibilities set in), there were more jars of nice jam. In the liquor cabinet was a terrific bottle of port, received for Christmas 2005, as well as some boxes of expensive candy whose origins are absolutely obscure, and thus, must be assumed to be older than is safe to eat.

I won't even tell you about the collection of intriguing hot sauces, nor about the trio of flavored oils in garlic, lemon and spice, nor about the coffee candy drops that I know my friend Amy sent when I was writing my book--that's several years back, for sure.

The pile of yummies that are now questionably edible has stopped me in my tracks. What a waste. What can be done differently?

Well, that jar of lavender honey that was on its way to the top "too special to use" shelf is now in the honey dispenser, ready for tea, ready for pleasure. The fig jam is in the frig, ready for a Tuesday toast breakfast that needs brightening. The chocolate lolly is in the trash, too bad, but the port, more happily, will be opened this Saturday night, if not before. The goodwill has spread past the kitchen walls, too. The Occitane body lotion given by a thoughtful friend after the baby was born has been pulled out of the bathroom cabinet to where I can see and use it before it turns to water. The light blue Eileen Fisher sweater I bought on sale three years ago in NY, yes, three years, I admit it, which I wore once for a TV appearance and then put away, because, you got it, I didn't want to ruin it, is front and center in my closet, ready to be donned for professional wear, baby drool on the way out the door beware.

Life has to be about using the good stuff, not waiting till it goes bad and has to be thrown away. It's like life with kids: about now, about what's happening this minute, this hour, today, trusting that what you need tomorrow will be there, that the good stuff isn't just the past, but the future too.

To anyone who, like me, has a secret stash of goodies, go for it, I say, and enjoy, now.